Yea the CEO's response was tone deaf and not tactful at all.
However, it seems insane that people are complaining about this for the following reason:
1. Reddit is not profitable, it is literally bleeding money.
2. No Reddit = No 3P apps to access Reddit.
3. The discussion that should be had is whether it is sustainable for Reddit to keep running it's servers and whether the recent decisions are made in favor of additional growth or survival.
reddit Premium costs $6/month and eliminates ads. That's an upper bound on how much reddit values serving ads to users. Include an API key with reddit Premium that users can plug into the app of their choice. reddit gets the value per user, gets the analytics per-user, and it's hard to complain about price gouging given this was the previous price for ad-free service.
Reddit makes money from ads having reach and they're hoping that only a small percentage get premium so that they can continue to make money off of ads.
Why would they reduce the reach their ads are having by making it easy for people to opt-out?
Their API pricing probably reflects the money they are losing by not getting the users on their own platform and showing them ads.
Their hope is that people would switch over to the main app so that their advertisers can pay them more.
It's this perception that assumes that CEOs can do no right by the people if there is a financial interest in not doing so.
Whether you believe this is the case or not, you have to agree that all nuance goes out the window and the mob is only satisfied when it gets what it asks for, not what is in its best interests.
They are certainly having g a poor track record. Most of the CEOs and managers I talk to think that it is a noble pursuit for them to be profitable because the free market determines what is moral and in the public interest. Its a pretty commonly held belief in the business world - it's very similar to a religious faith. 9ne manager even believed that scientific discovery only occurred to fulfill the objectives of business managers. Most scientific research in the US is publicly funded, so it isn't even funded by business. But, he didn't accept that explanation.
I was half joking when I was talking about nationalizing social media, but we should ask ourselves why we as a society are destroying these tools that we all used and enjoyed using because a bunch of money changed hands. Twitter is undeniably worse off, so is Facebook. Surely we have proved that we can have these things if we wanted to. At the very least, we should have net neutrality.
However, it seems insane that people are complaining about this for the following reason:
1. Reddit is not profitable, it is literally bleeding money. 2. No Reddit = No 3P apps to access Reddit. 3. The discussion that should be had is whether it is sustainable for Reddit to keep running it's servers and whether the recent decisions are made in favor of additional growth or survival.